2639: Ladino Use for Solitario (Extra Hebrew Diacritics) Mar 9, 2022
Solitario and Rashi script uses diacritics for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. This is also the case in modern Hebrew writing, but not as much in Yiddish, which used digraphs etc., possible inspired by German which has many of the same. Presently, Hebrew only has one digraph, which is נג <ng> like it is found in English, German, and Yiddish for the [ŋ] sound. In Solitario used for Ladino, this was not the convention, and diacritics were added to letters. For instance, the [dʒ] sound in the word 'Jump' or 'Giraffe' is written ג׳ or גﬞ from the basic ג [g], but in Yiddish this is written -דזש <dzsh>. The only similarity between Ladino and Yiddish conventions when it comes to non-Hebrew sounds is that Yiddish also used פֿ to represent [f] as opposed to [p].
Overall, not including the ones used in Biblical Hebrew (of which there would be an additional 5), Solitario used the added forms:
זﬞ for [ʒ] (like 'viSion' or French 'Je')
טﬞ for [θ] as in 'THree'
גﬞ for [dʒ] as in Jump
2265: Disparity in Yiddish Use between Men and Women Feb 27, 2021
These days, more men speak Yiddish than women. In certain communities of course, everyone speaks Yiddish often monolingually (or along with being able to read Hebrew). Still, for those for whom it is a second language, because much of modern Yeshiva study—exclusively for men—is still taught in Yiddish while women's seminaries generally use Modern Hebrew, there is a notable disparity.
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2108: Mixed Origins for Yiddish Gender Terminology Sep 22, 2020
Yiddish vocabulary is at least 80% Germanic but the more technical or academic terms tend to come from Hebrew. The words for gender come from Hebrew, but Hebrew only has 2 grammatical genders whereas Yiddish has 3. In Yiddish, the word for 'masculine' is זכר (zokher); 'feminine' is נקבה (nekeyve), both of which are Semitic, whereas the term for the neuter gender is נײטראַל (neytral). Someone familiar with this alphabet could tell this without even needing to know Yiddish or Hebrew because Yiddish adopts the spelling for Hebrew loanwords, whereas for any other word, such as with נײטראַל, the vowels are included.
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1715: Diminutive Suffixes in German Dialect Aug 25, 2019
About 80% of Yiddish vocabulary is from German, more or less depending on dialect, but when it comes to grammar the number is harder to discern. For instance, it is common for Yiddish to have the diminutive suffix -l (ל-), even using this in place of the word for small 'kleyn' (קליין) as is the case in German. For instance, 'city' in German is 'Stadt' (pronounced like SH-t [ʃt]), and in Yiddish it's 'shtot' (שטאָט), but a town—when not a village—is sometimes 'Kleinstadt' or just 'kleine Stadt' in German but 'shtetl' (שטעטל) in Yiddish. However, this Yiddish feature is Germanic, not Slavic or Hebraic, and does appear infrequently in some dialects. For instance, the Austrian town Neustadtl an der Donau (literally: New Little Town on the Danube) uses this convention, which is not really standard for German.
